There is a particular kind of governance that history keeps producing, and historians keep struggling to name cleanly. It is not incompetence exactly—incompetence is accidental. It is not corruption exactly—corruption at least pursues a coherent interest. It is something closer to organized unreality: the systematic deployment of state power against things that work, in service of grievances that are fabricated, on behalf of enemies that do not exist.
Medieval authorities burned herbs and called it medicine. They prosecuted astronomers and called it theology. They appointed inquisitors and called it justice.
The Trump administration prosecutes wind turbines and calls it energy policy. It dismantles vaccine infrastructure and calls it freedom. And it does all of this while the actual problems—the ones with real names, real casualties, and real price tags—metastasize in the background, unattended and worsening.
This is not a coincidence. This is the function.
The Anti-Vax Crusade: Science as Heresy
Let’s be precise about what is happening, because the language around it has been allowed to grow too soft. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a man who has spent decades building a career out of vaccine misinformation, who has compared childhood vaccination schedules to medical atrocities, who has published claims so thoroughly debunked that mainstream scientific institutions have run out of polite ways to reject them—now runs the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
This is not a fringe appointment. This is the commanding height of American public health, handed to its most prominent enemy.
The consequences are not hypothetical. Measles—a disease the United States officially eliminated in 2000—has returned with outbreaks spreading across multiple states. Vaccination rates are dropping as federal messaging plants doubt in the minds of parents who trusted the system. The CDC’s immunization infrastructure, built over generations at enormous cost, is being quietly hollowed out. Public health officials with decades of institutional knowledge are being pushed out and replaced with ideological loyalists whose primary credential is skepticism of the institutions they now control.
The cost of this crusade is not just measured in infections—though the infections are real, and some of them will kill people who didn’t have to die. It is measured in the destruction of institutional capacity that took fifty years to build and can be dismantled in a single administration. Every parent who delays a measles vaccine because a cabinet secretary suggested it might be dangerous is a downstream consequence of a deliberate policy. Every outbreak is a policy outcome.
Meanwhile, the actual health crises facing Americans—obesity, diabetes, maternal mortality rates that shame every peer nation, mental health infrastructure that collapsed years ago and was never rebuilt, opioid addiction still grinding through communities with no serious federal response—receive nothing. No urgency. No resources. No attention.
The witch hunt consumes everything. The real patients wait.
The Wind Turbine Inquisition: Prosperity as Heresy
The anti-renewable crusade operates on the same template, with the same structure, toward the same ends.
Trump has spent over a year asserting that wind energy is “the most expensive form of energy, by far.” This is false. Wind is the cheapest source of new electricity in the United States. He has claimed offshore turbines kill whales. False. He has claimed turbines last only eight years. False—they last 20 to 25. He has called them ugly, dangerous, monstrous. He has issued executive orders, pressured developers, and lost five consecutive federal court rulings—and then, having exhausted legal options, simply bought his way to the outcome: $928 million in taxpayer money handed to TotalEnergies to permanently abandon offshore wind leases and pledge never to build again in American waters.
Nine hundred and twenty-eight million dollars. Paid by American taxpayers. To a French company. To produce less electricity.
This is happening simultaneously with Trump’s Middle East war driving the largest oil supply disruption in history, with energy prices climbing every week, with consumers frightened about electricity bills they can no longer predict or absorb. The administration’s answer to an energy crisis it created is to destroy the one large-scale electricity source immune to that crisis—the one that requires no tankers, no chokepoints, no dependence on foreign supply chains or geopolitical stability.
The medieval inquisitor, at least, believed in the heresy he was prosecuting. He thought the witch was real. Trump’s administration has access to the market data. They know wind is cheap. They know it works. The courts keep telling them. The grid keeps demonstrating it. Vineyard Wind came online in March. Revolution Wind launched off Rhode Island days later. The turbines are not losing.
So the administration is not fighting a heresy it believes in. It is fighting a technology that threatens the business model of the industries that fund it. The inquisition, in this telling, is not theological. It is transactional.
The Arithmetic of Distraction
Add it up. Nearly a billion dollars to kill offshore wind. The cost of dismantling public health infrastructure and managing the outbreaks that follow. The economic drag of energy prices rising into a consumer base already stretched by inflation. The long-term cost of falling vaccination rates compounding quietly in school districts and pediatric wards across the country.
Now set against that: the problems receiving none of this attention.
America’s infrastructure is crumbling in ways that are not metaphorical—bridges, water systems, electrical grids that predate the modern era. The maternal mortality rate is a national embarrassment by any comparison to peer nations. Mental health capacity is catastrophically insufficient. The opioid crisis has never ended; it evolved. Climate change is generating costs—fires, floods, supply chain disruptions, agricultural losses—that dwarf every dollar being spent to fight renewable energy.
These are not obscure problems. They are documented, quantified, and politically acknowledged by virtually every serious analyst across the ideological spectrum. They are also profoundly unsexy as enemies. You cannot hold a rally about water pipe replacement. You cannot build a coalition around maternal mortality statistics. There is no crowd energy in the actual work of governance.
But vaccines? Wind turbines? There are crowds for that. There are enemies in that. There is a whole medieval architecture of threat available: the foreign technology, the elite consensus, the experts who think they know better, the shadowy forces undermining the real America.
The witch hunt is not a failure of governance. It is a substitute for it.
The Price
Societies that prosecute astronomers fall behind in navigation. Societies that burn herbalists lose knowledge that takes generations to recover. The losses are not always visible in real time—they accumulate in what doesn’t get built, what doesn’t get discovered, what doesn’t get prevented.
America is accumulating those losses right now. In measles wards that shouldn’t exist. In offshore leases bought and paid for, now permanently abandoned. In grid capacity that won’t be there when the next heat wave arrives. In public health officials who left rather than serve an administration that treats their expertise as the threat.
The Ministry of Unreality is open for business. It has a full budget, a clear mandate, and an enemies list that includes vaccines, wind turbines, and the basic evidentiary standards of modern governance.
The actual problems are on their own.